Trump’s out with his new immigration plan, if you can call it that, and needless to say it’s nuts. Predictions are hard, especially about the future, but I expect that it will help him with Republican primary voters and encourage other GOP candidates to come out against birthright citizenship.
The politics of immigration and trade are complicated. There are two main threads, one of which is nonsense and other, at least in some ways very correct. Here they are, as I see them:
(1) General xenophobia. The immigrants are lazy criminals, spreading disease and poverty. The Chinese are somehow taking over the world. This is all crap of course — immigrants have about the same unemployment rate as nonimmigrants, and much higher rates of entrepreneurship (job creators!). And if the Chinese are only taking over the world, if by “taking over the world” you mean “engaging in increasingly desperate currency manipulation schemes”.
(2) Anxiety about the effect of immigration and free trade on American jobs. This seems to me to be very legitimate. Undoubtedly, there are cases where relaxed immigration does put downward pressure on wages of American workers. This is almost certainly the case with high-tech, for example. Even more importantly, the age of globalization has been a terrible time for autoworkers, steel workers, and many others. I’m not suggesting that anything can be done about globalization, and I’m sure one could argue that there wouldn’t be as much high-tech in the US with out all the H-1B visas. But people in Flint, Michigan aren’t stupid for thinking that they were better off when more Americans bought American cars.
I understand that (1) and (2) aren’t perfectly related, but they both involve foreign countries. Maybe you could lump certain non-trade aspects of foreign policy in there too, but I don’t think the public cares very much those aspects, except when the country is engaged in a disastrous war.
If you get a chance, this Dave Weigel piece on Trump’s appeal to voters is very good. The people in the article talk a lot more about losing jobs overseas than about them damn brown illegals. Certainly, that’s partly of a function of what areas he went to, but I think there’s more to it than that.
Xenophobia plus job anxiety can be a potent combination. Republicans have never gone a great job of even pretending to care about displaced industrial workers. If Trump can successfully pretend to do so — even in the most ridiculous cartoonish way — he’ll have a leg up on the competition.
Update. I’m not saying I believe that we need all these H1-Bs for our tech industry to survive, just that I’ve heard that argued. My opinion is we probably don’t. But honestly the effect of immigration on the economy is complicated and not something that I claim to understand perfectly.
Jeffro
I don’t think this is overly complicated. Trump is giving a large portion of GOP voters exactly what they want to hear after thirty-plus years of job anxiety/difficulty/losses and thirty-plus years of going nowhere economically: a group to blame (immigrants). Only the fact that he rails against GOP politicians & the establishment as well as Dems has kept the entire party from rallying around him.
samiam
Anybody who has worked in high tech knows what utter horsesheit your whole H-1B theory is. You clearly have the same opinion as the mostly uneducated mostly rural almost all white and old blue hair rubes (ie. the Republican base) believe. Albeit on the opposite site…you still believe the same basic myths.
Guess you and Cole have something in common…Republican DNA.
Maybe spend some time reading about the H1-B visa and all the restrictions and rules before talking out of your arse about it.
dedc79
Just a little bored in the USA
Oh, just a little bored in the USA
Save me, white Jesus
Bored in the USA
Oh, they gave me a useless education
And a subprime loan
On a craftsman home
Keep my prescriptions filled
And now I can’t get off
But I can kind of deal
Oh, with being bored in the USA
Oh, just a little bored in the USA
Save me, President Jesus
I’m bored in the USA
How did it happen?
Bored in the USA
pacem appellant
Liberals hate Trump–or Trump likes to say that they do. Hence, conservatives love him. Nothing more than Trump using Cleek’s Law to advance his own cause. Trump ’15!
Arclite
Here’s a question: if much of my company’s software is developed in India, but we sell it to customers in the USA, aren’t we circumventing import tariffs and restrictions, or is that legal?
MattF
As Krugman notes, Trump is spoiling the game by offering the Republican base what it actually wants.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I always find it fascinating (in a stomach-turning kind of way) how easily and quickly conservatives manage to conflate “immigrant workers” and “illegal workers” and act like the problem is that legal immigrants are being paid minimum wage and not that companies are paying sub-minimum wages to illegal workers to drive wages down.
If immigrants — even illegal ones — had to be paid the actual prevailing wage and not the cheapo one the companies made up, most of the wage issues would vanish. But companies are gaming the system and then pretending the problem is the workers.
kc
Fear of foreigners plus job anxiety motivates a lot of GOPers, but then there are plenty of Republicans who think Americans are fat and lazy and dependent on government handouts, not like those good hardworking Mexicans who are willing to work long hours for low wages. As long as the Mexicans don’t live next door to them.
NonyNony
@Jeffro:
This is right
Ooh – so close.
Nope – what he’s giving them is a politician who is willing to say out loud all of the things they already say to each other. They’re happy because finally – finally! – there’s a politician out there who is “talking sense” and isn’t “beholden to political correctness”.
He isn’t giving them any new ideas – he’s parroting back at them the ideas that they already have. Without filters, without code words, and without apologizing for it because he’s trying to please everyone. That’s what they want – that’s ALL they’ve ever wanted – and he’s giving it to them.
These are the descendants of the group that Nixon decided to reach out to in the wake of the Civil Rights Act. This is the rump of the GOP that they need to pander to in order to get elected into office but who were never supposed to be anywhere near the levers of actual power. This is the bargain that Doctor Faustus made with the Devil 50 years ago coming back to bite him in the ass.
Matt McIrvin
I remember, as an upper-middle-class liberal kid, being unsympathetic to trade protectionism back in the late 70s/early 80s because I saw it as people trying to get us to buy inferior cars by stoking racist/xenophobic animus toward Asians.
Of course I was clueless about what was really going on. But there was some of that, and it might have backfired with liberal elites who were more sensitive about that than about economic pain and justice.
JPL
Governor Jindal also came out against the 14th amendment but qualified it to say illegal immigrants. I wonder why? Jindal was born six months after his parents arrived in the country on a visa.
CONGRATULATIONS!
The one group of American workers who got fucked harder than any other by illegal immigration are construction workers.
It used to be a ticket to a secure if somewhat no-frills middle class existence. Nowadays, McDonalds literally pays better.
shell
Thought this thread was gonna be about this:
In a column published last week on the conspiracy theory website WND, author Jack Cashill noted that questions had been raised about whether four of the 17 candidates in the GOP field were really “natural born citizens” and therefore eligible to run for President.
Another Holocene Human
You could argue that, and you’d be wrong. America puts out more STEM grads than there is demand. We’d rather employ phys majors as quants for Wall Street, making rich people even more obscenely rich than deep in the bowels of some boring tech firm inventing the next best thing. (And the reason for this lies in how Reagan and O’Neill “reformed” the tax code.)
Am I agreeing with samiam? Ew. Need to wipe off.
Another Holocene Human
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Union busting had noooothing to do with it.
cat
@samiam:
There exists a distribution of H1B visa users that try to keep wages and costs down on one end and top tier companies using it to recruit top talent on another.
If your claim is no single H1B visa worker was ever paid substantially under market wages, brought into the US with no real job for a body shop, etc then you are saying the dozens and dozens of articles and the individuals in them are lies.
Most people argue about the mean of that distribution and how to move it more towards fairness to the employee who is taking a big risk moving to a foreign country with at will employment.
Another Holocene Human
@Matt McIrvin: Oh yeah. No doubt. Look at who jumped on Toyotas and Hondas first demographically.
My parents didn’t have an American made car (they did have foreign cars under GM badge, which was part of protectionism) until the Japanese makers opened factories in the US.
Wanna know why? Detroit refused to put shoulder belts and head rests in the back seats of their cars (basically, whiplash protection) until quite recently.
No sale. No sale. No sale.
Jeffro
@MattF: K-thug: Trump really is the GOP base’s response to the attempt by the establishment to anoint Bush.
Another Holocene Human
@cat: H1B’s are very exploitative to the worker, which is why industry is always lobbying for more of them.
No worker should be treated that way. No worker.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@samiam: Literally every word of your post is absolute and utter bullshit.
But I’ll happily address the tech part, since I’ve been working in it for over twenty years now.
Here’s the big secret nobody wants you to know, not education grifters, not CEOs, not tech companies…nobody. Tech unemployment has been at or over 25% for over a decade now. So why are schools pushing STEM? So why are the Silicon Valley CEOs pushing for more H1B visas?
You can chisel the answer on American labor’s tombstone: “It’s cheaper that way”.
Joel
Trump is up to 7:1 on the betting markets. The 50:1 from a few weeks back looked like a pretty good buy.
Another Holocene Human
The other lie with H1-B’s is they are supposed to be issued if there are no qualified American candidates.
This part of the law has never been enforced.
Industry would even cry to Congress (mid-1990s) that Americans just wouldn’t work for such wages (as if this is a great argument), but it was a LIE.
There were laid off tech workers on, beside, and under every rock.
Industry wanted H1Bs in part because of the threat of deportation at any time. Bye-bye, no grace period to find another job. GONE. American workers, OTOH, have this horrible habit of calling labor lawyers when you do terrible things to them and tying you up in litigation. And you thought unions were bad.
Davis X. Machina
@Matt McIrvin
There were Kossacks, not a lot, but enough to notice — who were against the GM bailout because GM made bad cars, had sclerotic management, didn’t adapt to changing circumstances, and its bosses would just be insulated from the consequences of their own bad judgement by our bailing GM out. No sign of the three letters U-A-W…
So it’s a thing.
DougJ
@Another Holocene Human:
I think I agree with you about this. I’m just trying to say that, even someone could knock down this or that aspect of it, the issue of immigration lowering wages is areal issue.
bemused
Do the Trump fans in WeigeI’s piece actuaIIy beIieve Trump is on their side? Trump whose cIothes are made in China! This makes my head hurt.
gene108
Given the Republican foreign policy “agenda”, “philosophy” (can’t really think of the right word) that combines Know Nothing Isolationism – Treaties? We don’t need to be a part of no stinkin’ treaties – with aggressive military interventionism, I think the Chinese may well take over the world…because “hey China, you’re at least the coherent one…”
Honestly, I did not think this way before, but there are many treaties we’ve not ratified, because it can’t get through Republicans in Congress, which means the next time something important gets negotiated there’s going to be a point where we just get ignored because we’re not really serious after we step away from the negotiating table.
I do not know what Republicans hope to accomplish, because they are constraining our foreign policy to be limited to Freedom Bombs and not much else.
Another Holocene Human
One place my father worked ran on beautiful glowing streams of dosh from the Defense Dept. Everyone needed a clearance (so no H1Bs) and the company presumed that would keep everyone in line. So the wage theft started. Yeahhhhh… I’m going to need you to come in on Saturday. You can do that with classified exempt workers but you can’t then dock them hours during the week. Oh wait, they were docking hours missed during the week.
Yeaaaahhhh… I’m going to need you to pay millions in settlements to current and former employees.
Joel
@Another Holocene Human: Completely relevant. My folks’ first foray into Japanese automobiles was a NUMMI-made Geo Prism (formerly the Chevy Nova) back in the early 90s.
They stuck with the American-branded NUMMI stuff until the mid 00s when they just gave up the ghost and went straight Japanese. The jobs, as some have pointed out, have been moving to other states as much, if not moreso, than they have been moving abroad.
Amir Khalid
I notice that no Republican candidate protesting birthright citizenship has acknowledged that it can’t be abolished without repealing, or at least rewriting, the 14th amendment to the US Constitution (if not for which, at least one of them wouldn’t even be a US citizen).
Speaking of the Donald, he’s now taking aim at another employee of Fox News.
cat
@Another Holocene Human: The US produces less Computer Science graduates then Doctors and Lawyers. roughly 12k a year vs 18k/46k.
Most of the ‘Tech’ jobs go to the other STEM graduates, who are mostly unprepared and have to go through a lot of on the job training.
Rock
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I think that samiam was refuting Doug’s semi-assertion that there wouldn’t be as much high-tech production without H1-Bs…if so then you two actually agree…and I agree with both of you. Here’s a good read about H1-Bs that says pretty much what one would expect.
jl
@JPL: I just read that Graham has joined Jindal against birthright citizenship. Wonder how many others will fall in line, and how quickly? More entries for my Annals of GOP Outreach, oh boy!
As for DougJ’s hateful comments against dear Mr. Trump. I do not see how he can say that magically deporting all undocumented residents while magically keeping all the families together is not one fantastic high class plan that should please everyone with an open mind.
Similarly, taxing all remittances from undocumented residents in the US to their countries is obviously making the Mexican government pay, and hell, if the US government knows how to do anything it is to collect taxes WIN! How could it fail. And Trump has done the math to know it will add up the cost of the huge classy wall and tripling border agents. He is a successful businessman, fer keeraysts sakes!
And anyway, I saw a quote from Trump someplace that the specifics of the written plan are just BS anyway that loser wonks and reporters like to read. The important thing is that the voters trust him to do the right thing. I mean look, losers said Trump needed to write something down, Trump said he would write something down, and then he did, and you look at that plan it is all done very classy. OK? Yeesh.
Ha ha. Three strike you are out, DougJ. The real plan, whatever it is, if high class, terrific, total win-win for everybody. Trump says so.
The Raven on the Hill
Of course, conservative leaders have been sending manufacturing jobs away for decades. Mitt Romney’s fortune seems to have been built on this. But, no, it must be fault of the immigrants.
Jewish Steel
From the Weigel piece. A lot of people have thoughts like this.
schrodinger's cat
@Another Holocene Human: The bar for an H1-B is much lower than for an employment based GC, since it is a temporary visa and can be issued for at most 3 years at a time.
Archon
As long as Trump doesn’t have any “let me tell you something about the negro”, comments (he’s too savvy for that) I don’t think there is anything the GOP establishment and their media lapdogs can do to get him out of the race.
Another Holocene Human
@DougJ: I feel like union busting in all its forms has been far more significant than just increasing the labor pool. Although these abusive visas (legal immigration, not illegal, wake up, sheeple) are in a way their own form of union busting, controlling labor and preventing collective action.
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but temporary visas for farm workers aren’t employer-linked. Which means that workers can choose their employers and move from job to job. They’ve been able to create unions or pseudo-unions, engage in collective actions, and improve their wages and working conditions. They can also reject jobs that pay too little or employers with a bad rep.
In this field there has been a problem with farmers imprisoning workers and seizing their papers … you know … slavery.
KXB
We are a small engineering company – we have 4 full time engineers, a part-timer to handle the website, and I’m the full time admin. Two of our engineers are H1-Bs. It is not that we cannot find American-born and raised engineers – they don’t stay. For a myriad of reasons, for instance – while the company does offer a health insurance benefit, there is no 401K. American-born engineers flock to bigger firms right out of grad school because those firms can dangle more money and benefits than we can. Also, the firm is “majority-minority”, so many white engineers, who don’t know the boss from other areas of professional life and his reputation, might think their professional growth will be limited. Because we are a small firm, we often have to do things that might seem beneath our station – and engineers can be as snobby as any other profession.
Also, while out H1-Bs were born overseas, they did their graduate degrees here in the US. What is the point of educating them here and then sending them back?
As for the fees, paying filing fees and lawyers does not come cheap for a firm our size. For a company such as Skidmore Owings, Merrill – it’s chump change.
My revision to H1-B would be to limit it to small firms, both by number of employees and sales. A big firm with multiple locations should have less excuse for finding qualified candidates domestically.
Another Holocene Human
@cat: Didn’t we just get done with a computer science bubble? I think maybe some kids saw older brothers (not too many sisters in that cesspool any more) or even parents getting screwed and said fuck it.
(That said, I have a female cousin working in tech. More power to her.)
Barry
Samian: “Maybe spend some time reading about the H1-B visa and all the restrictions and rules before talking out of your arse about it.”
It’s well known that the alleged restrictions and rules are just that – alleged.
HB-1 visa holders are in general not highly paid, not highly qualified. The largest employer of them are a couple of tech temp ‘body shops’.
Joel
@Jewish Steel: “He’s a Generalissimo. Being a Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-Shek knows the ways around. I don’t think he’d go to Congress and ask. I think he’d just do it.”
cat
@CONGRATULATIONS!: “Tech unemployment has been at or over 25% for over a decade now. ”
This maybe demographics or maybe I’m just an ass. The only unemployed tech workers I know are non CS/CE STEM majors who went into Software Development and were mediocre to terrible at it. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years too. That may change as my cohort start getting into that age range where people wonder why you are a doer and not a leader, but such is life.
schrodinger's cat
Our immigration system for work visas is employer based, by that I mean that the employer has to sponsor you for the visa or a green card. Extremely few people can self sponsor and even then it takes months to build a case including the legal and immigration fees (EB 1a category for the GC). Until that changes it is going to remain exploitative of workers both immigrant and citizen.
Another Holocene Human
@KXB: H1B fills a legitimate need when done right. But it needs to be reformed. And the biggest thing to me is the employer’s power to just deport your ass if they’re tired of you. Although the other thing as you say is big firms using armies of H1B as a business strategy. Microsoft, anyone?
rikyrah
Folks, the birthright citizenship thing is a smokescreen. The Republicans have been after the 14th Amendment ever since Brown v. Board. Please understand – every advancement that this society has made since then is couched in the 14th Amendment.
See the forest for the trees, people.
When they talk about ‘taking their country back’, they want the delusional world of Mad Man, pre-Brown.
Matt McIrvin
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Cite? I don’t disagree with you about the effects of guest workers, but this number seems tremendously high and doesn’t jibe with the numbers I can find, nor with personal experience.
(Are you referring to young academics in the sciences? I might be able to see that.)
Another Holocene Human
@schrodinger’s cat: Our immigration system is fucked. The entire process. It’s cruel, humiliating, byzantine, non-sensical, and always, always plagued by incredible delays.
I also love the logic they toss at these Central American children. Sure, you’re a refugee from violence, but it wasn’t because of a protected class, so fuck you!
Jeffro
@Archon: They’d have to argue for a civil, thoughtful approach to governing if they want to contrast themselves with Trump. For some reason, I am just not seeing that.
It is going to look strange the next couple months as the guy who acts the most like a right-wing blowhard tries to defend his less-than-completely-right-wing opinions, while the true far-right-wing nut jobs try to position themselves as the ‘sensible’ (i.e., electable) choice.
jl
@jl: I looked at the plan. I didn’t see any typos. Nice headings, organized into sections. Very nice font. Looks very nice. Classy, and done very well. Mr. Trump, you are HIRED!
Joel
By the way, can I just say that I love the Cooper Black font on the “Haters Gonna Hate” T-shirt worn by the Trump supporter in the linked video? The only thing that would make it better is an accompanying soundtrack playing “Slow Ride” or “Jane”.
Another Holocene Human
@rikyrah: Great point.
Agree about “Mad Men.” Which is only a tv show, just like their fantasies about the past.
Earl
@samiam: you’re either a liar or utterly deluded. Let’s start with where h1bs work. The top 5 in order: infosys (32k), tata (9k), wipro (7k), deloitte (6k), and ibm (6k) [2014 data]. So we have a group of indian bodyshops and ibm, a company famously ditching as many american employees as possible. H1bs are therefore self-evidently not about constraining wage growth of domestic software developers :rolleyes:
I’m 10+ years into a career in the valley. Amongst other things, companies here paper over their refusal to recruit or retain minorities and/or women via immigration. Then whine about maybe paying $150k/year in sf, where the median 1-bedroom runs $3.5k rent/mo and condo prices broke $1.4k per square foot last year. And I’m aware you aren’t living in the poor house on $150k, but you are spending 50% of your take home pay on rent.
top h1b sponsors: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2014-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx
gene108
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
STEM is a really broad catch-all.
Some majors have never had huge demand, while others fluctuate with the market place.
Not every science major is employable with a bachelor’s degree.
@Arclite:
From what I’ve read, it’s a gray area in the law, as what is done here and what is done abroad is not clear, i.e. part of the team can work in the U.S. and part in India.
I do not think the law has kept up with technology.
Also, most of the sophisticated IT work is done in the U.S., such as the actual design of new software applications. The grunt work gets outsourced.
There’s a ceiling to what you can manage, staying purely on the technical side, as an IT professional in India, without traveling abroad. One reason there’s so much demand for people to come here.
Joel
@Matt McIrvin: Unemployment rate is very low for SEH doctorates, and has been since forever. That’s obviously different than an undergraduate degree in CSE, and the great jobs (tenured academic, industry group/division leader, etc.) are as rare as they’ve ever been, but still.
samiam
DougJ’s childishly simplistic opinion in a nutshell. “DE TURK AAR JABS!”
Same childishly simplistic opinion as your average Republican voter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUTnNKhF-EU
JPL
@jl: I still don’t understand how that works for Jindal. He was born six months after his parents arrived here on a visa. How does he plan on justifying that some immigrants who are not citizens and give birth children are citizens?
His parents were not citizens at the time of his birth.
schrodinger's cat
Many government labs and universities employ H1-Bs as scientists and post-docs. H1-Bs for non-profits are not subject to any quotas.
Some anecdata.
BTW I have a friend who is pediatric oncologist. She graduated at the top of her class, did her residency at Johns Hopkins and a prestigious fellowship at the NIH. She recently switched from a J-1 to an H1-B, and the only hospital that would sponsor her was an urban hospital in DC which has no pediatric oncology section and she has zero time for research, which is what she would need if she goes the self sponsorship route. Its easy to hate on immigrants but not easy to be one.
Belafon
@Another Holocene Human: Of the five companies I have worked at over the last 17 years, two of them fired people and replaced them with workers from India, and then brought them over to the US, specifically because they were cheaper.
cat
@Another Holocene Human: We had a Software Engineer/Developer bubble in the 2000’s. The 21st century has changed business so now every company is a software company since there are rather large competitive advantages an in house or captured software developer group bring to any business.
There may have been a CS/CE enrollment bubble, but not a graduate bubble, since a CS degree is basically a Math degree with programming the course work is challenging. The diversity problems in tech are represented in CS as well so that leads to a lot of attrition as well.
gene108
@Another Holocene Human:
There are only two solutions, either make it easier for people to immigrate or slam the borders shut.
There’s really no middle ground.
Belafon
@Belafon: My personal opinion is that the salary offered to an H-1B holder should match the salary given to a US citizen of the same skillset and experience.
JPL
@Belafon: Are you sure it wasn’t because of work ethic? lol I love how business equates cheap labor with work ethic.
eric
I think that Outsourcing and Automation have much more impact on US jobs (like orders of magnitude) and Republicans use immigration to distract from the things they have no intention of doing anything about since their corporate backers don’t want it to change.
gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
Don’t forget the backlog for people from certain countries and certain categories. You can be waiting easily 5+ years to get an employment sponsored GC from India. Actually, if you got it in 5 years it’d be super fast.
Probably 7-8 would be normal.
10+ is not out of the question.
schrodinger's cat
Speaking of evil corporations, even the worst of the worst today cannot hold a candle to the Honourable East India Company, among whose detractors were Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Edmund Burke.
schrodinger's cat
@rikyrah: I think their ideal world would be the one before the Emancipation Proclamation.
gene108
@Belafon:
The pay difference is not too far off. People do not come half-way around the world to be paid peanuts.
They know what other people are making and will change jobs to get it.
I think the bigger issue is if they are hiring contractors / outsourcing versus keeping permanent employees in place, i.e. fire permanent employees and bring a consulting firm’s employees to get the work done.
Edit: You then have the usual skim off the top that happens in contracting, so the company is paying about the same for a position, but 20% gets taken out before it reaches the worker.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
I think there was a certain amount of truth to your belief back then. The plain fact was that American automakers were putting out inferior products and asking people to buy them by using appeals to xenophobia. That doesn’t negate the fact that we were allowing our industry and middle class to be hollowed out; it just means that the people arguing for protectionism were using bad arguments to support their case.
Boots Day
@Amir Khalid: I do find it fascinating that these people who get all teary-eyed at what they claim to be liberties taken with our constitution now find that the very first thing they want to do is rip up part of the constitution.
Matt McIrvin
@Belafon: I think H-1Bs should be immigrants. Those highly skilled tech workers from all over the world? We want them in this country! They make the United States better! But get them in with green cards and a path to naturalization, and encourage them to stay here, raise their kids here, demand pay parity and spend their money in our economy. Much better than hanging a deportation threat over their heads if they don’t stay in their job. The nature of the visa is the problem.
Jeffro
OT but Jindal is banging on Walker’s Obamacare-replacement health plan, saying it’s too liberal (but of course), with a Jindal staff member…the one that is still left…saying that Walker “must have collaborated with Bernie Sanders” [on the plan]
Oooo, good one, Jindal staff member!
Oddly enough, both Walker’s and Sanders’ responses were the same: “Scoreboard.”
Brachiator
I don’t know. I figure it’s hard work being a criminal, and spreading disease. Trump really seemed to pull this one out his ass, and I was initially surprised that the lie resonated so much with some of his supporters. But I’ve recently seen the ugly lie about illegal immigrant and crime exploited by some of the local media, who regularly go to the police blotter and pick the worst crimes allegedly committed by illegal immigrants to become the focus of lurid special reports.
There’s always someone threatening to take over the world from the rightful ownership of America. China, the EU, Japan, Inc., OPEC. It’s an old story and Trump is just the latest snake oil salesman to latch onto it.
Really, three separate things.
For some reasons, many liberals absolutely refuse to distinguish between illegal immigration and legal immigration. And for some this leads to the foolish assertion that anyone who opposes illegal immigration really hates all immigrants. This only confuses the issue and adds to the anger over this subject. But the anger also hides any attempt to get at solutions to the problem (if there are any).
Anxiety over free trade and American jobs is real, but again you have idiot Trump promising the moon, and other politicians blandly insisting that somehow free trade helps everybody, so stop worrying. Either way, we’re being lied to, which only guarantees more anxiety down the road.
Calouste
@Another Holocene Human: I started as an H1-B, now on a green card. My total compensation last year was more than a Senator. I think there are quite a few workers who would like to be treated that way, I certainly don’t complain.
And of course DougJ’s argument that H1-B’s put downward pressure in high-tech salaries is not true. Netflix announced recently that they were offering 1 year paid maternity and paternity leave. (Benefits like those are a far more public and transparent measurement of compensation that actual salaries).
schrodinger's cat
@Matt McIrvin: Many of them would like to stay but they have to depend on the employer’s good graces. The maximum time you can be on an H1-B is 6 years, so if your I-140 is not approved by then you are toast.
I-140 petition to immigrate.
Another Holocene Human
@Calouste: Well, as long as we’re trading anecdata, one of my wife and my best friends spent three years in an abusive marriage to get a green card because H1B was not working out for her.
ETA: and she was a highly qualified former doctoral student in a specific area of food science … and she is still working in that field now.
Good employers who WANTED to hire her frankly admitted they didn’t know how to navigate all that immigration stuff. Meanwhile the people looking for H1Bs were, well, creeps.
kindness
Isn’t this all missing an important data point?
If no one can claim citizenship due to being born in the US and can only become citizens if one (or both) parents were citizens, how do those parents become citizens? I mean wouldn’t the parents be caught in the same Catch 22? Unless of course these Einsteins are saying everyone who was here in 1776 when we officially went rogue from England were automatically citizens and no one since.
For myself, I think American Indians should start asking for papers.
smintheus
@Amir Khalid: The argument being advanced by right-wingers is that the language of the 14th was meant only to deal with giving citizenship to freed slaves so now it is irrelevant. Not what it says of course, but that is their strategy to make it palatable to revise the 14th.
What they appear to be unaware of, amazingly, is the fact that birthright citizenship goes all the way back to the founding of the country. They imagine that it was invented in 1868. When you point out to them that the 14th was referring to already established law, they’re forced onto their back-up talking point: That travel is so much easier now than back then, whenever then was. They seem to believe droves of pregnant foreigners are flying in when their water breaks to have babies on US soil.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodinger’s cat: Exactly. So why not eliminate a step and turn the H-1B into the equivalent of an I-140? (Rhetorical question; I’m pretty sure I know at least most of the reasons why.)
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator:
Oh, you noticed that too?
I love anecdotal trends. Especially with lots of blood and gore and crying loved ones.
Calouste
@schrodinger’s cat: That’s not true. People can get extensions to their H1-B, one year at a time, if their I-140 is in process. (Unless the law has changed in recent years).
Another Holocene Human
@smintheus: It’s the old pull up the ladder after me song and dance.
Their ancestors benefitted from welfare for white people like the Homestead Act. Whatever hardships they endured don’t lay a finger on that of the enslaved population or Native Americans. They’re special just because and it will stay that way for ever and ever amen.
Belafon
@JPL: I’ll response seriously to your joke. One of the places was Nortel Networks. If you don’t know the company, it used to be one of Canada’s biggest companies, and owned the 45.x.x.x range of addresses. Due to shady deals and corporate mismanagement, it collapsed. I watched it collaps for about 5 years, watching half my coworkers get cut and then my group would get merged with another group. Finally, they cut a good chunk out and send the programming overseas – specifically to save money – moving me from a programmer to an architect. And then they brought some of them over here.
Nortel eventually closed up shop, going from 90K employees to 2600 when it got to selling off its assets.
Matt McIrvin
@smintheus: It’s even weirder than that: there’s a bunch of gold-fringe whaargaarbl about how “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” actually refers to “total allegiance” which is somehow inherited by blood. There is heavy overlap with Obama birther theories, as redshirt noted on another thread.
Another Holocene Human
@Matt McIrvin:
Kind of interesting argument there with the student visas, too. Everybody loves them because it ups enrollment and their parents seem not to blink at any fee or rate of tuition. But there is an issue with training all these PhD’s and then waving goodbye as they return to China and elsewhere.
Nobody has an answer. Nobody here wants to hire PhDs (except for the exceptions, but good luck being young and getting a job in academia these days that doesn’t amount to post-doc slave labor*)
*-not trying to be offensive, that’s what everyone calls it
Belafon
@Belafon: I can’t edit, but what I meant to say was that half of my group would get cut and then we’d merge with another group every six months.
Kropadope
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
100 times this.
This is also why I think the favored moderate Republican “compromise” of more guest workers with no citizenship, thus no rights, is the most disturbingly harmful policy for both native-born and immigrant workers, regardless of documented status.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
They’re going to make a legalistic argument that the 14th Amendment restricts birthright citizenship to people “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and that being in the country illegally means you don’t count. As I understand it, that clause was meant to disqualify cases like children born to foreign diplomats while they were here with diplomatic immunity, Indians living on land that was nominally American but still under tribal control (which was still important in the 1860s), children born to invading soldiers, etc., but I could easily imagine the Conservatives on the Supreme Court going along with the Republican interpretation.
Cacti
Here’s the logistical problem with “deport everyone” as an immigration strategy.
The current resources of ICE allow for the processing and completion of 400,000 deportations per year, maximum.
With approximately 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country, deporting all of them would take at least 30 years, and that’s without any delays or bumps in the road.
Even if the budget and staff of ICE were increased 10 fold, it would still take multiple years to remove every undocumented immigrant in the country, and outside of the military, the GOP is loathe to increase the budget of any Federal agency.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: They’re dogwhistling to the conspiracy theorists who believe that the 14th Amendment doesn’t actually guarantee birthright citizenship, or is entirely invalid.
JaneE
@samiam: Nearly as I can tell from working with tech people here because of H1-Bs, it is the modern form of indentured servitude. Out of 4 companies I saw, only 1 appeared to care about the person they employed, as opposed to working them 80 hour weeks under threat of immediate re-patriation. Even the good company paid their imported expert about 2/3 of the average wage for the job in our area. The bad ones paid about half the salary for twice the hours. Guess who was trying to sell our company on replacing our IT staff with long-term contractors as a cost saving measure?
They ought to make training two existing employees to the level of the H1-B skills they “can’t” find a requirement for issuing the visa. And if it is a multi-year visa, it should go to the individual with skills, at least after the first year. There were no shortage of people who could have been trained for a tenth of the cost of using H1-B contractors. In the long run, our company learned that. 3 Million dollars down the rat hole later.
smintheus
@Matt McIrvin: I hadn’t heard of the inherited by blood or birther aspects.
They’re basically reliant upon recent pseudo-legal conservo theorists who want to make the jurisdiction clause refer to a wider exemption than it was intended to do (the children of diplomats and American Indians in autonomous nations). A few years ago the main thrust of that argument was that the jurisdiction clause also referred to illegal aliens because they were living in hiding from the law.
dedc79
@smintheus: Here’s an example of the argument, courtesy of Rick Starbursts Lowry:
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: If being in the country illegally means you’re not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, then you’re not in the country illegally, because the law doesn’t apply to you… so then you are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, so you are illegal… so you’re not… so… [Star Trek explosion]
Cacti
@Roger Moore:
Aside from it having no basis in the legislative or case law history concerning citizenship, it’s an internally contradictory argument. If they’re not subject to the jurisdiction of the US when they come here, how could they be said to be here illegally?
MattR
@Roger Moore:
So if they aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States does that mean we can’t punish them for breaking our laws? I can’t think of a better way to encourage all the criminals in other countries to sneak into ours.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cacti: @MattR: These are just some of the many ways in which this “proposal” makes no sense whatsoever.
Peale
@Cacti: You pretend that “shove them over the border, operation wetback style” isn’t an option. Things can move swiftly if you don’t actually worry about sorting out refugees and assylum seekers and visa holders, permanent residents, and actual citizens from each other.
Brachiator
@Another Holocene Human: RE: But I’ve recently seen the ugly lie about illegal immigrant and crime exploited by some of the local media, who regularly go to the police blotter and pick the worst crimes allegedly committed by illegal immigrants to become the focus of lurid special reports.
Oh, you noticed that too?
Roger Moore
@eric:
That depends a lot on the job. For professionals and people in manufacturing, outsourcing/offshoring and automation are the big issues. For people who work in service industries, construction, or similar jobs that can’t be offshored or automated easily, immigration, especially illegal immigration, is a huge factor. American citizens used to be able to earn a living working as custodians, hotel maids, landscapers, or meat packers; now, those jobs are dominated by immigrants willing to work for radically less.
smintheus
@dedc79: Thanks for the link. The argument is typically half-witted. Lowry even argues that resident aliens’ kids aren’t US citizens because they’re just like Indian kids living in sovereign enclaves. Yikes.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
Don’t say that too loud;
BlackwaterXeAcademi will see it as a challenge.gene108
@Matt McIrvin:
Congress refuses to update the laws.
If we had a functioning legislature, some of the issues with H1-b’s would be addressed.
RSA
@cat:
No.
Cacti
@Peale:
It isn’t an option, absent amending the constitution to deny them due process of law.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
Not everyone who wants to come work here wants to stay. In academia, there are plenty of people who want to come to work in the US for a while and then go back to their home country; this makes sense, because working at a prestigious American university can be a big career boost.
Peale
@smintheus: It does happen that pregnant women come to the US to give birth. It’s just not the huge deal. Those “anchor babies” aren’t the reason why there are over 10 million undocumented laborers in the country and 40 million Latinos. The “birthright” citizenship isn’t targeting those births. It’s targeting the citizenship birth to a non-citizen, as if the only reason a young woman of child-bearing years would start a family is because she wants a citizen child. Immigrants “taking advantage” of our supposed generosity are breaking the rules by not putting off their entire lives while they are here and not planning to go home. Basically, punishing the children for having parents who want a family. Immigrant families are a sinister plot, you know. Unlike American families, where people fall in love and try to raise their kids properly.
schrodinger's cat
@Calouste: I bow before your superior knowledge.
Cacti
@smintheus:
Rich Lowry’s legal arguments would embarrass a first year law student.
gene108
@Matt McIrvin:
In all honesty, a functioning Green Card system for H1-B workers, from India, would alleviate a lot of the issues.
Come on an H1-b. Apply for a Green Card. In a reasonable period of time, say 2 years, you get a Green Card.
Go to some sort of points based system, so you can qualify based on your abilities and not the current system.
It’d solve a lot of issues really fast in this debate.
schrodinger's cat
@Peale: By this logic isn’t Jindal an anchor baby?
Cacti
@schrodinger’s cat:
Bobby Jindal is very much an anchor baby. His parents came on student visas.
Roger Moore
@Cacti:
But that’s assuming that we try to follow due process and all that other meaningless fluff. If we started deporting people because they look Mexican, don’t speak good English, and can’t produce their papers at a moment’s notice, we could move things along much faster.
MD Rackham
@Cacti:
And assuming that no one has any kids.
If it ever comes to such a solution, I suspect the final answer will be “re-settle them in the east.”
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Roger Moore: The hollowing out worked in the end. The CEO’s are getting paid more than ever. They used “finanical distress” to negotiate different contracts for newly hired workers, so they’re are getting paid much less than the long-time workers – and will be for their entire careers. Their longer term labor costs drop precipitously, and what does that justify? Another round of bonuses for management!
They did have to improve the product, which was probably a minor pain in the ass, but totally worth the fact that they no longer have to pay new hires true union wages.
Gravenstone
@samiam: Why don’t you go find a nice expressway, then go play in the middle of the fastlane?
mick
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Thank You!
goblue72
@Another Holocene Human: Why is there an issue with it? Both sides are engaged in rather simple business transaction. The colleges and universities are able to soften (somewhat) out-of-pocket tuition costs for U.S. students by charging foreign students full cost. The foreign students get to attend a U.S. college or university that is superior to whatever school in their home country they would otherwise go to. Upon graduation, those students get what they came for – a U.S. college diploma. We don’t owe them anything else.
Archon
@Cacti:
Don’t want to go all Godwin on you but 6 million Jews were rounded up and systematically murdered in basically 3 1/2 years.
A modern state that doesn’t care about laws and morality can be extremely efficient. And as far as I’m concerned a nation that willingly adopted Trump’s immigration plan no longer cares about laws and morality.
goblue72
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Nail meets head. I’ve spent most of my career in the real estate business – with most of that time in real estate development. I have, as it were, seen all the stuff under the hood nobody likes talking about.
The construction industry today in the U.S. involves the employment of large numbers of foreign-born workers, many of whom are undocumented migrants. On your average construction site – at least in the residential construction sector, whether single-family detached or multifamily – when the drywall and painting crews roll through, they are mostly, if not entirely, Latino (predominantly from Mexico). This does not mean every worker on those crews is undocumented. What is more often the case, is that its a mix – with all sorts of shenanigans involved, like paycheck sharing or working unlogged hours off-book, that are only possible when the workforce is able to get kept in line by threats of ICE.
The victims are not only the workers who are being exploited – but all of the American-borne workers – and the construction companies trying to play by the rules – who just can’t compete against what is literally sweatshop labor.
jl
@JPL:
” I still don’t understand how that works for Jindal. He was born six months after his parents arrived here on a visa. How does he plan on justifying that some immigrants who are not citizens and give birth children are citizens?
His parents were not citizens at the time of his birth. ”
Jindal says “too bad for you. That was then and this is now.” Looks tough for the GOP base. And take a page out of Jeb!?’s playbook: look visibly uncomfortable while saying that.
PurpleGirl
@Brachiator:
For some reasons, many liberals AND REPUBLICANS absolutely refuse to distinguish between illegal immigration and legal immigration.
FTFY. I really don’t hear many people period making the distinction.
Roger Moore
@MattR:
I didn’t say it was a good argument. It’s just a rationalization for doing what they want, and the fine points about it being illogical and producing results that they don’t want is irrelevant.
goblue72
@Earl: Agreed. And part of the issue with the H1-B discussion is that its not the same phenomenon everywhere. I’d imagine for a lot of industries, its a rather modest program and probably a real challenge for immigrants to use. I doubt your average U.S. hospital is chomping at the bit to use the H1-B program.
But in what we refer to as “tech” for shorthand – but really mean the software industry, like you said, its a whole other ball of wax. In the SF/SV Bay Area, its a huge deal. There are a number of large companies – as you’ve noted – that have made an industry out of importing lower paid programmers, mostly from India (they speak English), so that they don’t have to bear the cost of a U.S. worker – who annoyingly demand things like the job be a permanent one, with retirement benefits. And it is not a small thing – anyone who lives in the Bay Area and is even marginally familiar with the software industry out here knows it.
All you have to do is ride a commuter rail line daily to see it (BART, CalTrans, SCVTA, SamTrans) to see it – vast armies of H1-B workers, ID lanyards and laptops in toe. Heck, there are some BART routes (Fremont – SF comes to mind) that would probably be at 25% less ridership if you eliminated the H1-B program.
RSA
@goblue72:
For public universities, this can create some unfortunate incentives. At Berkeley and UCLA, for example, about 30% of the incoming freshmen are not from California. In general, state residents, whose taxes are a large part of the funding equation for most public universities in the U.S., can reasonably ask whether they’re subsidizing the education of students from elsewhere, and whether those out-of-state students are taking up slots that in-state students have a better claim to. It’s not always clear what the answers are or should be.
goblue72
@RSA: Oh I wouldn’t disagree with that. I think university administrations just look at the simplistic math of X foreign student pays full tuition, without considering how much embedded public subsidy there is per student, regardless of how much of the tuition price they pay out of pocket.
Rather, I was responding to the notion that we somehow owe foreign students anything other than the diploma. That its somehow “wrong” that after graduation we tell them to go home – when in fact, that is EXACTLY what the transaction was all along and all parties knew it going in – you give us money, we give you diploma, then you go home back to your home country, thank you for visiting.
RSA
@Belafon:
I think that if this is possible to do, then it’s evidence that an H-1B visa holder isn’t necessary for that position.
I think very strong evidence should be required for the need for such visas. Not just “These job openings are going unfilled,” but “These job openings are going unfilled even at x times the going salary,” where x is a lot bigger than 1.0.
RSA
@goblue72:
Oh, I see what you mean. Yes. Sorry about my misinterpretation.
Frankensteinbeck
Yes, but the people with legitimate concerns are not voting Trump. The people who want to hurt brown people are. People with reasonable fears are looking elsewhere for answers.
I cannot sufficiently stress how meaningless this is. People love cover stories that sound better than their real feelings, and soon convince themselves that the cover story is true. Surely you’ve run into this many times in arguments in person.
@gene108:
That is their goal. A sizable portion of the population, including almost all news media figures and Republican politicians, believe that violence is the only foreign policy that works.
PurpleGirl
As I see it, unless you have Algonquin, Mohawk, Lakota, Apache, Cheyenne, etc. genes in your DNA you’re an immigrant. Doesn’t matter if your ancestor came over on the Mayflower or some no-name passenger ship in 1917 from Sicily like my maternal grandparents. (Paternal grandparents came over earlier from Austria, like 1908 or so.)
schrodinger's cat
@goblue72: I don’t see what you are complaining about, but that’s exactly how it works right now. Students visas are temporary non-immigrant visas. International students can’t stay on, unless they can find an employer to sponsor them.
Roger Moore
@Peale:
It’s a big enough deal that they’re trying to stop birth tourism. As I understand it, there’s some attempt to make sure that pregnant women here on tourist visas are out of the country well before their due dates. There was a recent sting here in Southern California that shut down a whole birth tourism ring. They were engaged in a variety of illegal behavior: coaching women to lie on their visa applications, engaging in Medicaid fraud to pay for their hospital stays, and running illegal hotels where the pregnant women were staying while waiting to give birth.
goblue72
@RSA: No problem. Yesterday on a thread, I left an incredibly snarky comment that was intended for one of the recent Bushbot trolls, but accidentally replied to someone else. The Internets – tricksy, it is.
goblue72
@schrodinger’s cat: My comment was in connection to another one much further upthread that suggested that it was a bad thing that we allow for foreign student visas and then send them home afterwards.
goblue72
@Roger Moore: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/california-homes-raided-in-federal-crackdown-on-chinese-birth-tourism.html?_r=0
Yup.
Earl
@Rock:
anyone who runs their mouth about h1-b “restrictions and rules” — which are never, ever, ever enforced, not for any reason — is a shill
http://www.epi.org/blog/new-data-infosys-tata-abuse-h-1b-program/
dirge
You could say much the same about Wall Street, but nobody here is arguing that’s not a real threat. Money is a consensus reality; schemes to manipulate it are exactly as real as we allow them to be.
That said, I’m a bit more worried about Wall Street’s schemes than China’s.
But you can’t really argue that without accidentally also proving that we’re over-provisioned with high-tech. The primary difference between an H1-B candidate and a citizen you find or train is that the H1-B has vastly reduced bargaining power as a consequence of their contingent status. So the primary effect of the policy is to artificially increase return to capital relative to labor in the affected industries, resulting in over-investment relative to other sectors. Give those guys their bargaining power, by reforming H1-B, labor laws, or both, and that market inefficiency goes away, but so would all corporate support for H1-B, because preferring employees with no bargaining power is, after all, the whole point.
That said, I’m perfectly happy with all the H1-B holders I’ve worked with, and just wish they didn’t have to be terrified to ask for a raise for fear of being deported as a consequence.
Vanya
The foreigners who benefit unfairly from birthright citizenship are mostly upper middle class or wealthy. Some of this is actual “birth tourism” (also generally done by affluent mothers from Asia), some of it is just a free benefit that say a German expat working in the US can avail herself of, now giving her child added options for education and work that won’t be equally reciprocated for an American child born in Germany. In a globalized jet age “birthright citizenship” is an archaic concept that makes no sense (just as it makes no sense in the 21st century that Presidential candidates have to be born in the US), even if it is certainly way, way down the list on issues the government needs to deal with.